Theodore Robinson – 50th Reunion Essay

Theodore Robinson

302 Boxboro Rd

Stow, MA 1775

ted.robinson@gmail.com

617-680-8181

Spouse(s): Judith Eichholz (1982)

Child(ren): Anne (1984), Kate (1986), Scott (1989)

Education: Yale ’69 BS in E&AS

Career: Entrepreneur. Fixing and modifying radio receivers and transmitters, and designing antennas. Objective is to save the original social medium, ham radio. (more fun than the internet stuff.) Perhaps the FCC will quit listening to NEMA’s big tobacco–style sophistry, and do something about electromagnetic noise pollution.

Avocations: Surfing, sailing, ham radio (call K1QAR), trading derivatives, shorting ETFs

College: Calhoun (Hopper)

My first airplane, an Aeronca 7AC Champ, was older than I was.

My first blessing from Yale came while a senior in prep school, when I was selected as a volunteer math teacher in a borrowed Yale classroom. To manage my class of inner-city 6th graders’ behavior, I learned applied psychology. To effectively separate the bright kids from the rest, I soon learned to use shortcuts and traps when designing math test questions. This made reverse engineering the math and physics College Board questions easy enough for me to get three 800s, which probably got me into Yale.

After graduation I again got a job teaching math, where I found out dismissing the abler students five minutes early was a powerful motivator. The gains in student achievement were not to be, however, as this technique violated a State law mandating a fixed number of instructional hours. I retired and took up entrepreneurial pursuits too numerous to detail here.

In the photo, I’m in a two-seat Aeronca Champ. Swapping out the wooden prop for metal, changing the twist of the wings, and adding auxiliary fuel tanks added speed and tripled range. While enabling non-stop flight from Rhode Island to New Jersey it was still slow enough to be occasionally chased by dogs when minimizing headwinds by flying low along the Jersey Shore and Long Island beaches. This was the beginning of my use of the skies for transport, which spanned 5000 hours and three airplanes, all of which were modified heavily.

While the planes have all been sold, we still have a Hobie 33 sloop, which was modified into a cutter rig and raced single handed a few times between Newport and Bermuda. It sits on a thousand-pound railroad wheel in Block Island’s Old Harbor, and classmates are welcome to raft up.